Women as Child Carers: Arranging and Compensating Mothering in Early Modern Lancashire

Abstract

This article uses a database of fifty petitions submitted to the Lancashire quarter sessions courts between 1660 and 1720 to locate mothers who cared for non-kin children in early modern England. While boarding children with non-kin was a practice not unknown to historians, the identities and experiences of the women who provided the childcare have hitherto been largely absent from previous scholarship. These petitions were brought by women who were not receiving the appropriate or arranged financial compensation for their caring responsibilities. Through their descriptions of disorder in their arrangements, we can uncover not only the attributes of the carers and their lived experiences, but also more broadly what early modern English society expected from them. In addition, these petitions allow for a deeper understanding of how the practice of boarding children operated within and without the confines of the poor laws. Given the importance of child-rearing, and the belief that it was a female task, this mothering gave common women authority that would otherwise be less accessible to them. This article thus argues that women understood the wider significance of this labour and used the influence it offered them to their advantage in their petitions. More broadly, then, this article provides a re-examination of the relationship between women, the poor law and authority in early modern England.